The significance of the tapestry commissions which Pope Leo X gave to the Brussels workshop of Pieter van Aelst during the second decade of the sixteenth century has long been recognised.' Apart from the beauty and importance of the so- called Acts of the Apostles, the Grottesche degli dei and the Giochi di putti sets in their own right, the cartoons from which they were woven were to exert a tremendous influence on subsequent tapestry design and on the Flemish artistic community in general.2 In addition, the fact that the Acts of the Apostles cartoons, or copies of them, remained at Brussels after completion of the papal set ensured that during the 1530s and 1540s the French, English, Habsburg and Mantuan courts were able to acquire almost identical reproductions of a series which then, as now, was widely seen as epitomising the work of Raphael and his school.

During his visit to the Royal Palace at Aranjuez in 1626 Cassiano Dal Pozzo described what we may assume to be Titian's so-called second Prado version of the Entombment in a letter to Cardinal Francesco Barberini: 'Si vidde in un stanzino che serve d'Oratorietto un quadro alto da tre braccia in circa e Largo cinque in circa d'un Pieta o sia Christo morto con la gloriosa Vergine e le Marie, opera bellissima di Titiano della quale si vede la stampa'.' This painting had arrived in Spain in 1572 as a gift from the Venetian Senate to the diplomat Antonio Perez, and it soon entered the possession of the Spanish Royal Family.2 In describing the picture, Dal Pozzo was able to refer to a reproductive print - 'si vede la stampa' - made in 1563 by Giulio Bonasone (Fig. 7).3

At the turn of the seventeenth century, Ottavio Leoni (Fig. 18) was practising portraiture in the tradition of his father, creating closely observed images from the life.' This tendency towards naturalism was in tune with the new style gaining favour in Rome, and almost ensured Leoni 'membership' of the circle around Caravaggio." His portraits were widely praised, and although Giovanni Baglione, in his Vite of 1642, suggests that Leoni painted as many portraits as he drew, very little is known of his painted works or of the patrons who commissioned them.3 Recent exploration of the Borghese and the Roman State archives has uncovered Leoni's will, and documents identifying Scipione Borghese as one of his important patrons (see the Appendix, below). These documents also explain how the Borghese family came to own such a large group of works by Leoni and reveal the importance placed by the artist on his own drawings and engraved plates.

A previously unrecorded painting of St Francis in ecstasy by Bernardo Strozzi was acquired by the Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, in 1995 (Fig.28).' Of impressive size and in good condition, it is obviously a major addition to the Genoese master's oeuvre, but its correct placement within Strozzi's chronology has proved more difficult to establish. At the time of its acquisition Luisa Mortari had communicated her opinion that it was from Strozzi's Genoese period, c. 1618-20, a view that she repeats, with some modifications, in the recently published second edition of her monograph on the artist.2 When the painting was included in the exhibition Bernardo Strozzi, Master Painter of the Italian Baroque at the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, in the autumn of 1995, however, it became clear from the context in which it was hung that this dating was too early, and in his review of the exhibition Piero Boccardo pointed out that it showed a closer affinity with the Blessed Salvatore of Horta at Novi Ligure which dates from c.1625.' The evidence adduced below now suggests that it should be dated even later, within the artist's Venetian period.

The growing interest in the art of Carlo Innocenzo Carlone - which has led to an increasing number of publications over the past thirty years'- makes it appropriate to draw attention to a previously unknown drawing by him in the Biblioteca Comunale, Fermo (Fig.30), which originally belonged to the Marchigian painter Fortunato Durante.2 This sheet, in pen, black ink and grey wash on white paper, laid down, and with a green and black wash border, measures 31 by 49.1 cm., and bears two autograph inscriptions: 'La Gloria de Principi' at top centre, and ' Questo pezzo e di misura 29 piedi longo 15 in alto' in the lower margin. There are similar inscriptions in the same handwriting on a sheet depicting the 'Autorita dei Principi' in the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart.3